[Eril-l] DDA pool: disentangling publisher exclusions from high STL charges
Swindler, Luke
luke_swindler at unc.edu
Tue Dec 16 12:17:54 PST 2014
Building upon Lisa Gonzalez’s observations, I think librarians need to disentangle questions about which publishers to exclude from the DDA pool from concerns about high STRL charge—especially in terms of not letting the latter influence the former.
UNC Chapel Hill Libraries chose EBL as its only DDA provider in large part precisely because it allows libraries to avoid excessive short-term lending charges while offering users a robust array of potentially relevant e-books.
Even excluding e-books with a list price >$250 from the UNC DDA pool, STL charges have varied greatly. For a 24-hour checkout period, they ranged from <$1 to >$70 because of wide variances in both list price and publisher STL charges as a % of list price. Given that 3 STLs trigger purchase, UNC could incur >$200 in charges before automatically buying an e-book, resulting in an extreme case in total cost of >$500 when the purchase price is added to the STL charges.
UNC faced with three options for eliminating expensive STL charges:
* • Preemptively remove all publishers that had a STL charge above a specified % of list price;
* • Preemptively remove all e-books from the DDA when the STL charge would be in excess of a certain % of list price on an on-going basis
* o Either of these options would not only eliminate titles with low STL charges in absolute dollars but defeat the primary DDA goal to “Improve support for the academic enterprise by presenting faculty and students with a large number of potentially useful and relevant e-book for possible acquisition” as well as add to UNC’s DDA transactions processing costs; or
* • Move to mediated purchase for e-books when STL charge exceeds an absolute amount.
UNC will be implementing a DDA configuration whereby patrons are presented with a “Request Library Purchase” button to click if she/he wants to continue reading the DDA e-book with a STL cost of over $50 beyond the free 5-minute browse period. The system emails a notice to the Collections Management Officer indicating a DDA e-book purchase has been requested. As a rule CMO will automatically approve purchase—and does so as soon a possible after getting the request.
Luke Swindler
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Luke Swindler Collections Management Officer
Davis Library CB #3918 luke_swindler at unc.edu<mailto:luke_swindler at unc.edu>
University of North Carolina TEL (919-962-1095)
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA FAX (919-962-4450)
*************************************************“*****************************
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
On Dec 16, 2014, at 2:40 PM, Lisa Gonzalez <lgonzalez at ctu.edu<mailto:lgonzalez at ctu.edu>> wrote:
We also modified our DDA profile with YBP to exclude particular publishers who had raised their STL percentages significantly. We use both the Ebrary and EBL platforms through YBP; EBL had more options in their profiling to allow us to mediate STL requests at a certain price point in order for us to have more control over spending (our DDA program is unmediated.) Ebrary didn’t have these options, so that was where we modified our YBP profile to exclude publishers. I agree that publishers should see DDA programs as an opportunity to get more exposure for their publications, but I know they are concerned with the unpredictability of the model as far as their revenues are concerned.
Our overall DDA philosophy is to get as many ebooks as possible that might be of interest to our patrons, even in peripheral areas. We are heavily focused on theology and Biblical studies in our DDA profile, but have modified our program recently to allow more cognate areas; we don’t anticipate this will cost significantly more, since I think that if our patrons aren’t interested in the cognate areas, they simply won’t use the ebooks. The focus of our cost control efforts is on list price and STL costs – for us, it is more economical to buy the ebook after one STL. Looking at our usage statistics for the past couple of years, about 10% of our discovery pool of records gets some kind of use, including browsing, STLs and purchases. While excluding some publishers eliminates ebooks our patrons might otherwise be interested in, we need to be able to control costs in order to be able to offer DDA titles to our patrons for potential use.
Lisa Gonzalez
Electronic Resources Librarian
Catholic Theological Union
5401 S. Cornell Ave.
Chicago, IL 60615
773-371-5463
lgonzalez at ctu.edu<mailto:lgonzalez at ctu.edu>
From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 8:47 AM
To: Mary Beeker
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] looking for group wisdom on Patron Driven Acquisition: limiting by publisher
We only limited out a tiny handful of "predatory" publishers whose names won't be mentioned here for fear of lawsuits, until last spring. Then, we were informed that a few publishers, including one major scholarly publisher who also won't be named, had significantly increased their "STL" price as a percentage of the book price to a level that we considered violates the entire point of STLs. So our response was to work with our PDA profiles, YBP, to exclude those publishers, and with the PDA book vendors to retroactively remove all of those publishers's ebooks from our existing set.
I strongly believe that we as a community need to send a loud and clear message to the publishers that if they engage in these practices that undermine these wonderful new technologies, they will lose, not gain, profit by doing so. They can hold us hostage to price increases in the journal sector of the industry, but not on the books. Being included in our PDA profiles should be considered by them a marketing privilege that we offer their products only if they deserve it.
Melissa Belvadi, UPEI
On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Mary Beeker <mbeeker at nmc.edu<mailto:mbeeker at nmc.edu>> wrote:
Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask this question, please let me know if I should post elsewhere...
Can anyone share their philosophy/advice on including publishers in their PDA collection?
We've had some rude shocks seeing what is available in our new PDA collection. We're wondering whether to exclude publishers from the entire PDA profile, or perhaps to include publishers in certain call number ranges, but not in others (e.g. our clinical nursing section)
We're a community college, so we need some intro-level books, but reliability is key to us.
If this becomes an interesting discussion, I'm happy to collect responses and share them.
Thanks all!
- Mary
--
Mary Beeker
Northwestern Michigan College - Osterlin Library
mbeeker at nmc.edu<mailto:mbeeker at nmc.edu>
(231) 995-1015<tel:%28231%29%20995-1015>
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Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca> 902-566-0581
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